Recent links of note:
“Where have all the great aphorists gone?”
E. J. Hutchinson, The American Conservative
Why is it, asks E. J. Hutchinson in The American Conservative, that in the age of Twitter, precisely when aphorists and their pithy pronouncements ought to be most prized, they seem to have disappeared? Food for thought, and in the course of discussing the history of the art, Hutchinson does much to shed light on why that is. He hits, for instance, upon the link between “aphoristic writing” and “aristocratic writing,” drawing on the observations of W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger; the “sort of calm confidence that need not account for itself” is certainly at odds with the popular and egalitarian concerns of the twittering commentariat today. What’s more, one must be willing to delimit one’s purview in order to strike at the aphoristic universal; in editing their 1962 Viking Book of Aphorisms, for instance, Auden and Kronenberger were forthright in centering on “writers belonging to what, for lack of a better term, is called Western Civilization.” How many would call this closed-minded today? In any case, one hopes that Hutchinson’s questions will be answered, ideally in rather fewer words than many.
“The Scene on the Bridge”
Lili Owen Rowlands, London Review of Books
To fend off questions about the arthritis debilitating his hands late in life, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is quoted as saying that it was no matter—“I paint with my prick.” Some would argue that Picasso, who owned several Renoirs, had a similar painterly approach. The critic John Berger once wrote that “Picasso finds himself in women.” In her recently republished memoirs, Françoise Gilot—one of his many lovers, and perhaps the only to leave him of her own volition—was less sparing in describing that revolving door. Reviewing those memoirs for London Review of Books, Lili Owen Rowlands observes: “Gilot is especially attuned to the choreography of it all. Instead of cutting things off with any one woman, she writes, Picasso kept them all just offstage ‘letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain,’ beckoning them from the wings whenever he needed inspiration or entertainment.” Bleak, perhaps, but these memoirs do more than air dirty laundry. In 1965—after the two had separated, and the book had been released—forty artists, including Joan Miró, signed a letter calling for her memoirs to be banned, and Picasso even took Gilot’s publishers to court. The judge, Rowlands writes, found instead that the memoirs “revealed Picasso to be a man of ‘astonishing interior richness’ and contributed to his glory better than any official biography would have done.”
“Our Mindless and Our Damned”
Antón Barba-Kay, The Hedgehog Review
One might think that, aside from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, few stories about what we’d now term “the undead” would have a strong case for inclusion in the Western canon. In a perceptive essay for The Hedgehog Review, Antón Barba-Kay may not convert all who hold horror in low esteem, but he shows just how much vampire and zombie stories—we may even call them modern myths—reveal about the essential concerns and anxieties of our age. Tracing its lineage back to the Faust and Don Juan stories of early modern Europe, through World War II, and beyond, this piece will interest anyone with whom Goya’s epigram resonates: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”
Podcasts:
“Roger Kimball introduces the March issue”
The Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion mentions a handful of noteworthy pieces and reads from the opening pages.
Dispatch:
“Visions of the implausible”
Mario Naves on “Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect“ at the Morgan Library & Museum.